Article from education outlet has teachers confirming ways they get around Texas CRT laws
February 16, 2023
As when we investigated CRT being taught in Ohio, in Idaho, we found much the same thing in Texas. The education bureaucracy, the school districts, take little to no notice of what the legislature, the law or even the parents say and carry on as they wish.
We can also approach this same point from the other direction. Why not look at where people complain about these laws? What do they publicly say they’re doing in the face of these insistences? Some media outlets are sympathetic to, supportive of, these educators. So when teachers or bureaucrats are speaking to reporters they think will be sympathetic to their troubles, what do they say?
In December, EdWeek asked some teachers how they deal with the Texas law against using CRT and associated ideas in their teaching.
To be fair to EdWeek it does quote the law correctly:
Teachers also cannot be required to teach about slavery and racism as being “anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.”
We think that’s a good idea. But even if we didn’t it’s the reaction of some of the teachers which is instructive. One teacher has moved out of a “heterogenous” (meaning mixed) school to a predominately Black one so she can continue to teach as before.
“I elected to leave an environment where I felt like my teaching certificate would be put in danger,” she said. “Where I felt like I would have to curb the things that I say, or where I felt like I could not allow the students to take conversations where they wanted conversations to go.”
But the law is statewide. What we’ve got here is direct evidence – public evidence freely given – that certain school districts, at the very least, are not obeying that law. For if this teacher felt that one district would limit her teaching under the law and so moved to another where she is not so limited then the law must be applied differently. Even if it’s to a different school within the same district the same logic holds.
Now, there are other things that teachers say in this piece, like “ We’ve kind of deviated from becoming an antiracist education system.“ This could be true, but it depends upon the definition of antiracist we use. If it’s the standard one in the language, of being colorblind, then that would be bad, that we deviate from that. But modern education systems have another meaning – to be colorblind is to be racist, because it fails to acknowledge the lessons of critical race theory.
But the big and important point here. AIM has repeatedly released videos that show that the educational bureaucracy keeps teaching divisive concepts like CRT even when the the law tells them to stop. We’ve just done this again in Texas. When media outlets sympathetic to teachers ask them about the laws we get told, well, I just moved schools to teach the same way. Well, there we have it, proof that the law isn’t being universally obeyed.
We get told the same thing in private and in public. We should take folk at their word then, shouldn’t we? Or are we in a world where we really can’t trust what teachers tell us? If we are, what do we do about that?